Sample Secular Wedding Ceremony Script

How to Write Your Own Wedding Ceremony

If you're writing your own wedding ceremony, it can be hard to know where to begin. After all, there are a lot of resources for writing your vows, but relatively few available for writing your own wedding ceremony. This example is a particularly beautiful one which incorporates ritual and tradition. Feel free to adapt it to meet your needs and personalities. Read more about planning your wedding ceremony

Welcome

Officiant: Welcome, family, friends and loved ones. We gather here today to celebrate the wedding of Serena and Casey. You have come here to share in this formal commitment they make to one another, to offer your love and support to this union, and to allow Serena and Casey to start their married life together surrounded by the people dearest and most important to them.

So welcome to one and all, who have traveled from near and far. Serena and Casey thank you for your presence here today, and now ask for your blessing, encouragement, and lifelong support, for their decision to be married.

Definition of Marriage

Officiant: Marriage is perhaps the greatest and most challenging adventure of human relationships. No ceremony can create your marriage; only you can do that – through love and patience; through dedication and perseverance; through talking and listening, helping and supporting and believing in each other; through tenderness and laughter; through learning to forgive, learning to appreciate your differences, and by learning to make the important things matter, and to let go of the rest.

What this ceremony can do is to witness and affirm the choice you make to stand together as lifemates and partners.

Declaration of Intent

Officiant: Will you, Casey, take this woman to be your wedded wife?Groom: I willOfficiant: Will you, Serena, take this man to be your wedded husband?Bride I will

Readings

Officiant: In the spirit of the importance of strong friendships to a marriage, Serena and Casey have asked two friends to read selections about love that especially resonate with them.

1st READING

2nd READING

Support of Community

Officiant:Two people in love do not live in isolation. Their love is a source of strength with which they may nourish not only each other but also the world around them. And in turn, we, their community of friends and family, have a responsibility to this couple. By our steadfast care, respect, and love, we can support their marriage and the new family they are creating today.

Will everyone please rise.

Officiant: Will you who are present here today, surround Casey and Serena in love, offering them the joys of your friendship, and supporting them in their marriage?

All: We will

Officiant You may be seated.

Wedding Vows

Officiant: We've come to the point of your ceremony where you're going to say your vows to one another. But before you do that, I ask you to remember that love – which is rooted in faith, trust, and acceptance - will be the foundation of an abiding and deepening relationship. No other ties are more tender, no other vows more sacred than those you now assume.

If you are able to keep the vows you take here today, not because of any religious or civic law, but out of a desire to love and be loved by another person fully, without limitation, then your life will have joy and the home you establish will be a place in which you both will find the direction of your growth, your freedom, and your responsibility.

Please now read the vows you have written for each other.

Bride and Groom I Serena/Casey, take you, Casey/Serena to be my husband/wife, my constant friend and partner, and my love.

I will work to create a bond of honesty, respect, and trust; one that withstands the tides of time and change, and grows along with us.

I vow to honor and respect you for all that you are and will become, taking pride in who we are, both separately and together.

I promise to challenge you, and to accept challenges from you.

I will join with you and our community in an ongoing struggle to create a world we all want to live in, where love and friendship will be recognized and celebrated in all their many forms.

Our home will be a sanctuary and a respite for us and for those whom we cherish.

Above all, I will give you my love freely and unconditionally.

I pledge this to you from the bottom of my heart, for all the days of our lives.

Officiant: May I have the rings, please?

Please repeat after me: I give you this ring, as a daily reminder of my love for you.

Officiant: By the power of your love and commitment, and the power vested in me, I now pronounce you husband and wife! You may kiss each other!